Gone without a trace

Missing Van disappeared along with Kirsten

In 2000, a 17-year-old Kirsten Kryszak (left) sported dreadlocks when her family, including sister Ashley, visited over Labor Day weekend.

Family photo

Kirsten Kryszak, at 13, and her mother, Karen, at her mother's wedding to Pete St. Mary, on Valentines Day 1996.

family photos

Kirsten's mother and father, Robert Kryszak, divorced when she was young. Her father eventually moved to Memphis, where Kirsten joined him at age 16.

She would be 25 now.

She would still have her looks -- the smashing smile, the big brown eyes, the killer dimples -- and maybe she would have settled down. Or if not settled down, calmed down, grown up.

Seven years after Kirsten Kryszak disappeared, the last people to see her tell conflicting stories.

Tonight, in the heart of Midtown's Cooper-Young area -- Memphis' mini-Greenwich Village -- Kirsten Kryszak might have strolled past the funky little storefront that is Goner Records.

Dropped in for a quick bite at Dish Mediterranean Tapas Lounge and said hi to Scott, the roadie-turned-cook she would know from the old days and, like her, a recovering drug addict.

Landed at the Young Avenue Deli for tonight's Lucero show. Hung out with some of her musician and wannabe-musician &quot;friends&quot; from back in the day -- Brent, Josh, and the guy everyone called &quot;Tolly.&quot; Maybe even run into Angela, assuming that wild kindred spirit still draws breath.

Or maybe, as she did seven years ago, Kirsten Kryszak would have gone to a party. That's what you're supposed to do on New Year's Eve, right? Go to a party,

have a good time, let the last night of the old year bleed into the first day of the rest of your life?

That's what Kirsten, then 18, did on a cold and snowy Sunday night.

Maybe it is what she would do again.

Maybe this time, she would make it home.

* * *

&quot;I knew the minute I heard she was missing,&quot; says Kirsten's mother, Karen St. Mary. &quot;I just knew.&quot;

Seven years later, there is no evidence that Kirsten Joy Kryszak is dead. Her body has not been found.

Neither is there any evidence that she is alive. For seven years, her Social Security number has been inactive.

In the days and weeks after she disappeared, an investigator from the Memphis Police Department's Missing Persons Bureau interviewed several people. The sum of those interviews: Kirsten was last seen driving away in a 1988 blue Ford Aerostar van owned by Bradford S. Toland -- &quot;Tolly&quot; to friends.

Toland, Josh Anders and Brent Wolverton, who was semiboyfriend to Kirsten, said then and says now that she stole the van on New Year's Day.

Anders also said then and says now he drove her around for &quot;four or five hours&quot; before she stole the van. They were the last people to see her.

No detective from Missing Persons has spoken to any of them in at least six years. Sgt. Barbara Olive, who has had charge of the case for several years, has never talked to them.

The van, like Kirsten, has disappeared. Database searches using the van's vehicle identification number show no activity since 2000. And the MPD's Central Records returns no document showing that Toland reported the van as stolen.

Twelve days ago Toland, in a brief telephone conversation he ends by hanging up, says he did report the van stolen.

Sgt. Olive says it is possible a formal report was never processed because Toland and Kirsten knew each other. Olive also says: &quot;She's not really the auto-stealing type.&quot;

Toland does say he was at the New Year's Eve party. But he refuses to discuss Kirsten or how she came to allegedly steal his van. He doesn't even want to talk about the old days of making a little music with Anders and Wolverton in a band called Interstate.

&quot;Man, I moved on,&quot; Toland says. &quot;That's a part of my life I don't want to recall.&quot;

* * *

Kirsten grew up in northern Indiana, the daughter of Robert and Karen Kryszak. She had a younger sister, Ashley, who's now 22 and living in Water Valley, Miss., with her boyfriend and their daughter, Sarah.

As Ashley holds Sarah in her lap, feeding her a bottle, she remembers Kirsten loving Mom's Ragu spaghetti and strawberry-flavored ice cream. More than once when speaking of Kirsten she instead says &quot;Sarah.&quot; It unnerves the young mother.

When Kirsten and Ashley were little, their parents divorced, the father eventually moving to Memphis, where he still works as an auto-body man and lives with his new wife and their young twins.

Karen also remarried. The divorce, as divorces do, hit the girls hard and perhaps in ways they didn't understand. By the time Kirsten was 13, she was using drugs and sneaking out of the house. At 16, she moved to Memphis to live with her father.

She attended White Station High School for at least parts of two years before dropping out. Twice, her father put her in Lakeside for drug rehab. It didn't take. She kept using and he kicked her out of the house.

Kirsten bounced from place to place, and apparently from man to man, in the weeks before she disappeared. This, her mother and father know, is what she came to be: troubled, unpredictable, self-destructive.

Yet not only do they still love her, they still cherish the little girl who smiled through crooked teeth before braces. They still hear that child giggling, still marvel at the way she almost seemed to take flight when running along the shores of Lake Michigan amid the dunes and the birds.

&quot;The seagull chaser,&quot; her father says with the quickest of half-smiles as he runs a hand over his black hair pulled tight into a ponytail.

Now Kirsten has become a ghost unreachable even to psychics (yes, a desperate mother tries everything).

Years pass ... she never calls.

Years pass ... she doesn't send a card or an e-mail.

Years pass ... and candles are blown out on family birthday cakes, the little plumes of smoke dying before they can kiss dining room ceilings.

Sgt. Olive says at one point they tried to get Kirsten's case put before a cold case squad working out of homicide, &quot;but before we could get them to take it, (the unit) kind of dissolved.&quot;

The bureau receives an average of 400 new missing person cases each month. Retiring Lt. Stephanie Hanscom says they have a 97 percent clearance rate.

&quot;Our cold cases get pushed aside for what we have on a daily basis,&quot; says Hanscom.

Kirsten disappeared on New Year's Day. But her mother didn't know until Jan. 3 when a man named Earl called to say Kirsten hadn't been home since Dec. 31. Earl had recently started letting Kirsten stay with him in a duplex in Orange Mound.

Karen didn't find this all that unusual because Kirsten had run away before, in Indiana. And in Memphis, her father had filed a runaway report in August 2000. Turned out to be a road trip to South Dakota, where she and several other people were busted for drug possession.

At 5:30 in the morning on Jan. 7, Karen received another call from Earl. Kirsten still hadn't shown up. Karen called Memphis police.

The missing persons unit had just been formed in October 2000 and the department initially staffed it with retired detectives. A retired detective worked Kirsten's case. Over the years, the case has been handed off to one detective and then another.

Olive, a 25-year MPD veteran, is a pleasant woman. Lt. Hanscom describes her as &quot;kinda nonchalant, but she has a way with people -- they start telling her stuff.&quot;

Olive goes over Kirsten's case quickly:

Kirsten &quot;made a little scene at the party.&quot; Her boyfriend, identified as Brent Wolverton, was there. She was last seen driving the van owned by Toland. She left in the van alone &quot;as far as we know,&quot; Olive says.

Detectives spoke with Toland and Wolverton, Olive says, but &quot;then it got to where they wouldn't return phone calls.&quot;

Olive hasn't spoken to Wolverton, Toland or Anders, she says, because the addresses and phone numbers gathered in 2001 are no longer good.

As for what happened to Kirsten?

&quot;It's a hard thing to say,&quot; Olive says. &quot;But whatever happened, it was possibly the end result of her choices.&quot;

* * *

Late in summer 2000: Kirsten had taken her hippie persona -- the beads and homemade jewelry, the patchwork dresses, the affectation for reggae singer Bob Marley -- a step beyond.

&quot;She had dreadlocks,&quot; says her sister Ashley, who with her mother, stepfather and half-brother came for a visit over Labor Day weekend and stayed at The Peabody. &quot;It looked so bad.&quot;

Brent Wolverton, now 31, married and working a construction job, today describes his relationship with Kirsten as &quot;nothing serious, man. It was cool for the time being.&quot;

* * *

Toland, the owner of the van, refuses to discuss her.

* * *

And then there's Josh Anders, who said he drove Kirsten around for &quot;four or five hours&quot; in Toland's van on New Year's Day. He said she couldn't find the house she was looking for and she stole the van when he returned to Wolverton's Midtown apartment and got out of the van.

By any measure, it is a peculiar story.

Now, in December 2007, a stranger approaches the tall and angular Anders one morning in his gravel driveway outside the little yellow house he shares with his wife and their two dogs and three cats in Byhalia, Miss.

Anders, 28, wears blue jeans, an old pair of black tennis shoes and a brown jacket over a black sweatshirt. He is about to climb into an exhaust-spewing pickup and drive to work at a granite shop.

A pack of Marlboros rests in his jacket pocket, and he carries a plastic cup of yogurt and a banana.

The stranger mentions the missing girl's name. Anders rubs his hand over his light brown goatee, and his eyes go searching.

In 2006, 4,344 people went missing in Memphis, according to Memphis Police.

This year, through Dec. 17, 4,127 missing person cases have been filed.

The missing persons bureau receives an average of 400 new missing person cases each month, and according to retiring Lt. Stephanie Hanscom, 97 percent of those are cleared.

$10,000 reward

Kirsten Kryszak's mother and stepfather, Karen and Pete St. Mary, are offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to the resolution of Kirsten's Jan. 1, 2001, disappearance. Anyone with information on the case should call Crime Stoppers at 528-CASH (528-2274).